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Remote NT community frustrated by wasted funds

ELEANOR HALL: To the Top End of Australia now where Aboriginal people often express frustration about the way that government services are delivered to their communities.

The small community of Binjari says it's dealt with more than 50 different service providers in just the last 12 months and that these services bring their own staff duplicating existing resources.

Sara Everingham compiled this report.

(Sound of workers in a garden)

SARA EVERINGHAM: At the Binjari Aboriginal community on the outskirts of Katherine in the Northern Territory, workers are in the community vegetable garden.

The community would like to see more programs employing people from Binjari.

SYLVIA MARONEY: Yes, it is just, we wanna see a future for Binjari to grow more stronger for our future children's children.

SARA EVERINGHAM: Sylvia Maroney from the Binjari Community Aboriginal Corporation says people in the community are frustrated that agencies delivering government-funded services here often bring in their own staff.

SYLVIA MARONEY: Yes, some of them are helping us achieved for best for our people but they are not providing employment for our community people. That's the one we need really, 100 per cent in these communities is employment for our people.

SARA EVERINGHAM: The community says it wants to make sure government-funded programs help it achieve its own plans for development.

The board has drawn up a list of guidelines for all organisations working in Binjari. The community wants organisations to talk to the community before government grants are awarded.

Silvia Maroney says the community will ask the organisations what they want to do in Banjari and why and how they will make sure local people are employed.

Another aim of the paper is to avoid duplication.

The community which has a population of fewer than 300 people says over the past 12 months it's dealt with 60 different service providers.

SYLVIA MARONEY: If they want to come and provide services within Binjari itself, they need to come up front the board 'cause we are here for the people and we want to make this Binjari strong. They need to come here first if they want funding and everything.

SARA EVERINGHAM: Brian Gleeson, the federal coordinator general for remote service delivery has heard these concerns before in some of the other remote communities he works in.

His job is to help improve service delivery in 29 Aboriginal communities around the country.

BRIAN GLEESON: I often use the example of youth where we have sometimes three levels of government - local, state and federal - who are trying to provide youth support, youth services, youth programs in places like Wadeye for example and unfortunately they don't necessarily talk to each other.

And if you add the dimension of the NGOs where also they have been asked to do some work, you do have a tendency to have overlap and duplication and from the committee perspective, it still looks like the people are not coordinating effectively.

SARA EVERINGHAM: Last month the Northern Territory's outgoing coordinator-general Olga Havnen released a scathing report that criticised what she said was the Commonwealth's increasing reliance on non-Indigenous non-government organisations with fly-in fly-out work forces to deliver services in remote Aboriginal communities.

The federal coordinator-general Brian Gleeson says he's been working with the non-government organisations to draw up a set of principles to make sure government-funded programs are what communities want.

BRIAN GLEESON: The things we discussed were things like the critical need for coordination integration at the community level, issues of cultural sensitivity being observed and also capacity building extra strategies to ensure a greater legacy for a local organisations to, you know, take control over time.

SARA EVERINGHAM: And you mentioned that these were principles to work by. I mean, are they principles or will organisations be required to make sure they do these things if they are receiving government funding?

BRIAN GLEESON: What we come up with at the round table was a very strong consensus around the principles being observed. Also in terms of you know, how we could ensure that there's some accountability in terms of how they are maintained.

And we had some government agencies at the round table, the work shop and we talked about whether or not we should be putting into tendering and procurement arrangements, putting into funding agreements some of these conditions to basically use them as a leverage to ensure these principles are met.

SARA EVERINGHAM: The Federal Government says it's committed to jobs targets for Aboriginal people to build the capacity of local organisations to deliver services.

At Binjari Sylvia Maroney says her community will do what it can to hold service providers to account and to make the most of the Government's spending.

ELEANOR HALL: Sara Everingham reporting from the Binjari community in Australia's Top End.